The Architecture of modern wireless networks allows radio access network (RAN) to interface with the Internet or other external networks via so called core networks.
The following abbreviations represent various modern wireless networks, their components and some communication protocols:
In existing third and fourth generation (3G and 4G) wireless networks, various transcoders and trans-raters can determine which bit rate to allocate for streaming media streams towards the RAN, wherein the determination can be affected by the bit rate if the streaming media streams. These devices may use propriety algorithms that are responsive to the bit rate of the streaming media streams but their details are not known outside the devices.